However, labor market conditions are markedly worse in many corners of the country.

We combed through the latest BLS employment report to put together the major metropolitan areas with the highest unemployment rate within each state.

Combine this with weak wage growth and inflation at around 2 percent and you get a sense misery in America.

There's a concept in economics called the "misery index," developed by economist Arthur Okun. The idea is that the combination of unemployment rate and inflation rates makes for an accurate measure of local misery.

Assuming that inflation rates are generally constant across the country, we identified the most miserable cities based on unemployment rate.

States likely include smaller cities with higher unemployment rates that were not captured in this particular data set.

Note: All data is for March 2012 and data is preliminary. The unemployment rate is calculated as a percent of the labor force of the city.